Sophie Gibb is Senior Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy, Durham University. Her research is in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind, with particular interests in the mental causation debate, the categories of being, and causation, laws and powers. Recent papers are on the ontology of the mental causation debate, the subset account of property realization, and tropes and laws. She is leader of the philosophy of mind work group within the Durham Emergence Project, which is an interdisciplinary research initiative involving collaboration between philosophers and physicists, made possible through the support of the John Templeton Foundation.

Dominic Gregory teaches Philosophy at the University of Sheffield. He has written on the logic, epistemology, and metaphysics of modality, but his work has lately focused upon various questions concerning distinctively sensory representations such as pictures and sensory mental images. His recent book Showing, Sensing, and Seeming (OUP 2013) develops a general account of the nature of the contents belonging to those representations: the book contains detailed philosophical examinations of sensory mental imagery and pictorial representation, and of memory, photography, and analogous nonvisual phenomena.

Catherine Malabou is Professor of Philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University. Her work focuses upon the inter-relationship between Continental philosophy, neuroscience and recent discoveries in epigenetics through which she has developed the concept of ‘plasticity’. Her publications include ‘The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage’ (2007) and ‘Self and Emotional Life: merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis and Neuroscience’ (with Adrian Johnston, 2010).

Éric Laurent is a psychoanalyst and former president of the World Association of Psychoanalysis. Trained by Jacques Lacan in the 1970s, Éric Laurent was a member of the directorate of the École freudienne de Paris at the time of the School’s dissolution in 1980 and has been a member of the École de la Cause freudienne since its inception. He was editor-in-chief of La Cause freudienne from 1992 to 1994 and currently teaches within the framework of the Clinical Section of the Department of Psychoanalysis at University Paris-VIII.

Michael Garnett is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck College. He works in political philosophy and the philosophy of agency, where his research concerns a number of issues related to the idea of freedom. Recent papers are on the nature of autonomy, the idea of human unpredictability, coercion, and the relationship between freedom and agency.

In ‘Judiciousness in Dispute’ Lyotard gives us an image of the seventy-four year old Kant beset by a near-permanent head cold. Here, while the mind, through a sheer effort of will, has the capacity to overcome a variety of ailments, thought nevertheless causes it severe pain, a pain to which it is not just opposed, but which indeed accompanies its very operation. To the extent that this ambivalent relationship to pain is insurmountable, the ageing philosopher’s inflammation of the head is linked to what Kant himself describes as an involuntary spasmodic state in the brain, that is, a certain inability to maintain concepts, or to secure the unified consciousness of related representations, which Lyotard wants to suggest is fundamental or necessary, rather than merely contingent upon an ailment contracted late in life. To what extent is post-Kantian thought in pain? In what ways is such ‘pain’ prolonged in philosophies that seek a radical departure from Kant? For instance, in seeking an exit from the subjective representation of objects (for Lyotard, the source of Kant’s ‘pain’)? Does speculative materialism risk a certain lapse into a psychotic state that—as both Lacan and Kristeva suggest—may be arrested only through the onset of phobia?